Michelle Obama: I Faced Certain Questions Because Of 'Fears And Misperceptions' Around My Race

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/09/michelle-obama-tuskegee-commencement_n_7249232.html

Michelle Obama said on Saturday that she faced a unique set of questions when she was on the brink of becoming the nation's first African-American first lady during her husband's presidential campaign.

While Obama said that she was subject to questions that could be expected of the spouses of many candidates, she added that she believed she faced certain questions because of the "fears and misperceptions" of others.

"As potentially the first African-American first lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations, conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others. Was I too loud, or too angry, or too emasculating?" she said during her commencement address at the historically black Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama. "Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?"

Obama also referred to incidents in which she was accused of displaying "uppity-ism," and called one of Obama's "cronies of color" and "Obama's baby mama." She said that it "knocked me back a bit" when a cartoon of her appeared on the cover of the New Yorker with an afro and a machine gun.